Olympus Intros 3D Scantop Device

(December 11, 2001)

Olympus announced today at Internet World 3D ScanTop, a 3D animation system for e-business. Leveraging the recent advances in high-resolution digital cameras and personal computers, 3D ScanTop enables you to create realistic and accurate 3D animations at the touch of a button, eliminating the need for extensive modeling or costly laser techniques. 3D Scantop speeds up the delivery of 3D content for e-business, education, arts and entertainment applications.

Olympus 3D ScanTop includes everything needed to create 3D content: easy-to-use 3D ScanWare software, lighting, and turntable. Creating 3D models take a few simple steps. The 3D ScanWare software controls all system components, the camera, turntable and lights. After a quick calibration step, the user simply places the object to be photographed on the turntable.

With a touch of a button, the system captures a series of images of the object at different angles, using parameters such as resolution and number of images, set by the user. After the images are taken, the state-of-the-art software removes the background and creates a realistic and accurate 3D model. Once the 3D model is created, the color and texture of choice can be applied.

Supported 3D formats include:

VRML 1 (wrl)

VRML 2 (wrl)

Alias/Wavefront (obj)

3D Studio (3ds)

AutoCAD (dxf, Geometry only)

Stereo Lithography (stl, Geometry only)

3D ScanTop is not only easy to use, it is also packed with powerful features. Any model that is created in 3D ScanTop can be imported into some of the most popular 3D modeling software. Creating 3D models in 3D ScanTop and importing them into 3D modeling software will save hours of work form the traditional method of creating model from scratch.

Other key features include registration of multiple scans, texture editing, integration of web features such as sounds, hyperlinks, animations, actions, etc. In addition, the flexibility to select the image resolution and other parameters allows you to customize each scan to suit your application.